Executive coaching benefits rely on these predictive factors

More and more companies have been investing in coaching for their senior leaders in the past 20 years as they recognize the benefits of executive coaching. As a result, coaches now come from a wide variety ofprofessional backgrounds and use many different approaches. How can a company, or an individual leader, predict whether a coaching engagement will be helpful or not?

A recent article published in Consulting Psychology Journal provided some answers to this question. In psychology, there are two basicresearch methodologies — quantitative and qualitative. Quantitative researchtypically studies large samples of people and crunches the numbers tounderstand what’s going on. Qualitative studies, on the other hand, usually lookat smaller samples to understand the “how.” The CPJ article used the second approach to dig down into the coaching experience and identify some key predictive factors of success.

Executive coaching benefits follow these success and failure predictors

Some of the CPJ results were what you mightexpect, but others were pretty surprising. The researchers found these factorsthat we might have guessed at:

Success Predictors

• Trustin the coach and the coaching process

• Agreementabout coaching goals

• Self-efficacystatements that reflect the coachee’s belief that s/he is capable of doing whatis required to reach the goals

• The use of techniques inspired by cognitivepsychology (focusing on changing thought patterns to change behavior) and positive psychology (focusing on building on strengths instead ofemphasizing deficits and shortcomings)

Failure Predictors

• Hidden agendas and politics
  This can be a very real problem in coaching, especially when the coachee isreferred by his/her boss or HR. I have had clients who thought they were beingreferred for high-potential leadership development when in fact they were onthe verge of being fired.

• Lack of transfer of learned skills to the workplace

Here are some of the surprises:

Success Predictors

• The ability to achieve deep psychologicalreflection and understanding
  In my experience, many coaches focus on rapid behavior change, not on deeppsychological reflection. So this is an interesting finding.

• Coaching across language barriers andcultural/racial divides
  The surprise is that this is not a barrier to coaching success. This is veryreassuring to coaches like me to work for global companies and coach peoplearound the world.

• Dominant-friendly behavior
  The friendly part is not a surprise.  ButI was intrigued by the finding that dominant behavior was a positive for boththe coach and the coachee. You might expect that the relationship would workbetter if one person was dominant and the other submissive. But in the high-octane world of executive performance coaching, both the coach and thecoachee need to be able to express their power. 

Failure Predictors

• Sexism
  The surprise for me was that this does not refer to coach sexism, but to coachee sexism, stereotyping about male or female coaches that prevents the coachee from being open to what the coach has to offer.

As we continue to learn more about the expanding world ofcoaching, both coaches and coachees will be more able to judge whether the fitis right and the work is getting done. And that will be good for everyone.

If you are interested in effective executive coaching for your leadership, email ggolden@gailgoldenconsulting.com todiscuss what format might work best.